Chalk & Cheese

I really enjoyed Zora Neale Hurston’s witty and accessible style. I spent a lot of time thinking about her piece “Art and Such” (- unrelated, but I liked reading it in its manuscript form) and what has changed since she wrote it in the 1930s. Although she writes that the 1930s are “as different from the 1800s as chalk is to cheese,” which can probably also be said about the 1930s to 2019. She wrote that at the time black artists were limited to sorrow: “This is what is expected of me and I shall be considered forgetful of our past and present.” Today, as we try to strive for intersectionality, I feel like we expect an artist’s Blackness to factor into their art. Hurston quotes a critic who wrote that one of her stories “is about Negroes but it could be anybody,” which she seemed to take as a compliment. In the context of the time/her opinions, I get why that was a positive review, but it also made me a little uneasy because I feel like white people often want race removed from discussion. Today if someone made art about the Black experience that could easily translate into a story about white people it would feel flat because race is really hard to remove from the American experience. I always come back to being pulled over for speeding, because as much as cops make me uncomfortable I have never felt truly unsafe in their presence. If I created a character that had my exact life story and personality except she was Black and got pulled over for speeding, at least that part of the story could not translate directly because of America’s terrible history with police violence. But here I am, debating the difference between chalk and cheese. I also acknowledge that Hurston is speaking as an artist – she wants a diverse and broad spectrum of Black art. She believed those who continue to write only of “Sorrow Songs” were using the “line of least resistance and least originality,” to create work “certain to be approved by the [race] ‘champions’ who want to hear the same thing over and over.”